It hit me last night. What is worse then all of the Physical things I suffered growing up? Lovelessness! I didn't have any love, I don't know how to love. My flashbacks I feel most of the times are of a moment in time when I am frozen and alone. I never understood what these flashbacks were showing me.

They were those moments where yet again something had come about where I needed a mothers love but that oppertunity had yet again been missed. It was the emptyness, the futility of the situtation.

I keep getting this feeling of wanting to love someone, something but I shut it down as soon as it lifts its head. It learnt that to love means to be shamed, to feel ineduqate. It was just a painful reminder of something I was missing.

Sometimes I tell T I'm gonna quit therapy before we reach the ending because I don't want to have to mourn the loss. I want to quit on my terms and wipe it all out of my memory. T says that way I wipe out the good as well.

I didn't know exactly what she meant by the good. Now i know, its the times I feel "loved" by her. I fear feeling that love because it hurts, its scary, I don't want to remember a time it wasn't there. I'm afraid to let it into my life now incase I have to re-experience loosing it or not having it.

I dreamt last night after these thoughts, that I decided to leave my house that we bought 11 yrs ago and returned to the run down tower block I once lived in for 12yrs, where drugs and squalor were the norm. In this dream I was trying to convince myself I was happy to be back in that dump and not in my lovely home I have now. I wondered if that was my experiencing going back to that time when love didn't exist?

It was a powerful dream and I know I am not ready yet to feel those feelings of loss in my waking hours. My depression is up and down right now. I feel so much then shut down again.

My memorys of my physical abusers are a cover to hide from me the pain of there being no love in my life! This isn't a post to blame anyone, it is just how it was!

[Rapunzel]

Mouse, I think you are onto something huge there. I can relate. Love is scary, isn't it?

Rap

[Perna]

I've had to remember that I was there with Me; my wonderful, curious, loving, sweet, honest, brave, tenacious self doing her best against larger forces but winning through for me. I imagine it's horrible being the survivor of a shipwreck, a war or any "natual" phenomenons like that. I think some childhoods are that way too.

I have a picture of me where I'm standing shoulders hunched, arms straight like sticks against my sides, squinting into the sun and about 4 years old. It looks like I'm way across the front yard from my father who's probably the one taking the picture. I cringe when I look at it but am glad also that it's a picture, a picture of the past and I'm not like that now. Look at some pictures when you're thinking about the past -- it reminds me it's the past so I don't get quite so sucked in.

I think we do things "full circle" and I am working hard now to be "ready" when the next turn comes. I don't think we do all this therapy and work for nothing, just for cleaning up the past. There's real stuff to be learned and it was a "test" of our character but not the only one.

[Soidhonia]

Hello Mouse.
I think you are doing very well on determining the ins and outs of life and relationships. I hope you spend more time with your therapist on your recent discoveries so that you dont have to feel lost and alone and unloved, but instead trying to turn the negative reactions into positive motivators to share with your therapist to help you move forward with your life. Take care Mouse Soidhonia.

[withit]

I agree with Rapunzel that you are onto something big here. You've hit a core issue and you are one insightful person! Whoa!
I can definitely relate to the 'aloneness' and despair that accompanies the aloneness of a child.
The first step in processing past trauma is awareness. You are aware, very much aware, and you will grieve at your pace,
In the meantime,
Take gentle care,

I agree with all of the above-- you are relating your past experiences to your relationship with T, and that's a powerful and important step. I often think about ending my relationship with T on my own terms-- it is how I ended male relationships in my past-- so I would never have to feel. How ironic that we missed out on love when we were young, but we end up pushing it away when we become adults... It's so hard to find the balance. Which is more painful? I often don't know. I find that the few close relationships I have cultivated cause fear and anxiety for me because I'm so scared they will go away... Yet the opposite of that would be to be alone. Which is worse? You sound like you are getting so much out of therapy, Mouse. Take care.

[Smilie]

Wow! Thats a lot to take in. Thanks for sharing.

Smilie

yeah, i hear you mouse. this is something that i've come to over the past couple of weeks as well.

schore calls it 'attunement' which are moments when the (m)other and infant are emotionally in synch (both having a positive emotion) or when the (m)other is acting as an external regulator of the infants emotion (soothing the infant from a negative emotion into a positive one).

lack of those sorts of experiences... are thought to be damaging. because the infant is left in a negative emotion without the capacity to regulate that themselves. so it tends to last a while (and it is the limbic system going nuts, basically). and since the (m)other isn't performing the external regulatory function the infant never gets to internalise that (it never gets to be mirrored in the neurology) so that they can serve that function for themself in later years.

(therapy is meant to help by providing those experiences so that they can be mirrored in the neurology so you can learn to regulate your emotions better)

sometimes it hurts when my therapist is attuned to me. that is strange, huh. sometimes when i feel happy in therapy my therapist is going 'whats wrong?' because i guess i look a bit disorganised. not sure what that is about.

shame... there is quite a lot of stuff on how we learn to be moral. people think that morality is highly dependent on ones ability to experience 'the moral emotions' (shame and guilt and the like). schore talks about how shame is used to regulate unrestrained narcissism. so sometimes infants get carried away with the positive effect. it escalates and escalates into something of an unbridled manic / narcissistic state. one way a (m)other can regulate that unrestrained narcissism is through use of shame. a look of disapproval on a (m)others face induces shame in an infant. shame results in the infant stopping doing what they were doing (it inhibits action). hanging the head and the like (submission). it is important to make some use of shame (that is how we learn to be moral and to follow social norms and conventions and the like and also to inhibit our own unrestrained mania / narcissism) but shame is probably something that tends to be overused.

(my mother used to induce shame and then leave me so i'd be in a dysregulated state of shame. i think the idea is to have a look of disapproval - to induce shame - then to soothe the shame so the infant is happier again but not in such a manic variety of happiness)

for me... i think what happens is that happiness, especially the happiness that comes from attunement (when therapist seems happy with me) are almost immediately followed by shame. probably because my mother overused shame when i was an infant. i guess she didn't know how else to externally regulate my escalating into mania anymore than she kneew how to externally regulate my distress into something more positive.

so... happy -> shame. happy -> shame. repeat a couple times and now i don't need her external (dys)regulation i'm more than capable of doing that myself.

sigh.

(sorry to ramble. hope it makes some semblance of sense)

[Talulah]

(((((((((((((((((((mouse))))))))))))))))))))))))